


Case #0180314

by wanderNavi



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, as usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 15:31:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20117383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: Statement of Diana Huang, regarding a visit to a family friend, given direct from subject. Date is March 14th, 2018. Statement taken by Frederick Adlerson of the Usher Foundation.





	Case #0180314

_Statement of Diana Huang, regarding a visit to a family friend, given direct from subject. Date is March 14th, 2018. Statement taken by Frederick Adlerson of the Usher Foundation._

Hmm, well, you know, I’m still not certain why I’m here. Why I decided to check out this building among all the other neoclassical government buildings of this place, away from the Mall and the basin. I’m supposed to be at the National Gallery. Doing some art studies, reacquainting with master paintings I haven’t seen in a while. Enjoy being in a museum again that doesn’t have a lobby clogged up with messy ticket lines and self-serve kiosks, cause I’ve still been raised too well by the Smithsonian to expect free entry. Then go paint the cherry trees a bit, despite the crowds.

When the receptionist or security guard or whoever it is you have out front asked if I had a story – a statement – to tell, at first I was going to walk right back out the doors. But, _ha_, here we are, I guess.

This happened a couple years ago. While I was still in high school, the summer before junior year. Late August, right before school started, in this tiny sliver of time my family had free from work and college prep and internships for a vacation. Kinda. Really, the main reason we flew to Cali was for the colleges. My brother’s studying physics, math, engineering, that whole STEM vein you know, and we went to see the usual suspects: Cal Tech and Stanford.

We were there for a week. Sure, the main purpose was to tour the schools, but this was also the first time my brother and I saw the west coast, so we made a proper vacation out of it. Landed in San Fran, rented a car, drove up and down Route 1 through Big Sur, that gorgeous Hearst Castle, back around through farmland and Yosemite. Touristy stuff. Despite the drought, or maybe partially thanks to it, I fell in love with those hills and sea. The golden grass. Not so much the mountains, scared of heights.

Though we landed in San Francisco, we didn’t stick around there the first day. Lucky thing too I guess, the weather didn’t quite agree with sightseeing that day. A foggy mist rolled through the roads we drove the first afternoon, so thick and white we could barely see out the car windows. We did, however, stay for longer at the end of our trip.

My mom has a college roommate, I think, that lives in the suburbs right by Stanford. _Ha_, has a lot of college roommates. Way things were in China, they stuffed eight girls into one room for the four years. It’s how we get a lot of local tours and brief overnight stays, I guess. Through her friend network.

One evening, I think after we toured the university campus, we swung by my mom’s roommate’s home. A single-family house, weirdly skinny, with rooms strung up in a row, rather than our more squared off rectangles here. Two stories, enough for mom, dad, two daughters, two cats. The garage led to the kitchen combined with its dining room, which led to the entrance way and staircase, which led to the living room and which in turn opened back out to the lawn.

When we arrived, the sun was beginning to set. I’m not … I’m not entirely certain how I got to what happened next.

My brother wanted to see the cats, but the cats had other plans and were outside the house somewhere. He went off to try luring them out of hiding, though without any enticing treats that went nowhere. But I guess that’s how he left the house.

The daughters had … summer homework? Something to work on and I believe they were upstairs for that. My mom and her friend were discussing, oh, politics or gossip or far, far more likely the college application process. So, I guess they went into the kitchen for that. Or … maybe outside as well, to help and amuse themselves with my brother’s efforts. The house got, it got quiet. And suddenly, it was just the father and I alone in the living room.

I really don’t know why it was so dim in there. The sun was setting, but it wasn’t that far along its descent yet, and the windows had the curtains drawn way back so they were wide open to let the light in from outside, but. It was, quite dim in there.

A table lamp was turned on, but the lampshade was so thick barely any light escaped the tiny radius around the table it sat on. Just enough to really illuminate half the arm of a sofa and the corner where the walls met. Enough for the room to have an old orange tone that thickened the heavy brown of the floorboards and the wooden tables and the bookshelves lined up against a wall.

I was standing by one of those bookcases, admiring small wooden figurines and painted fans set on display and to collect dust. An elephant, a typical pair of mallard ducks. But slowly a faint kinda electric tinge began creeping up my back as I stood there in the quiet dimness.

During high school, I wasn’t in a great mental state. Barely slept and experienced swings into paranoia. Developed a bit of hyper awareness for where people were around me, especially behind my back. The buzzing sensation of someone standing too close behind your shoulder would cascade down a plane around my body, in the direction of where the other person was. You know how it feels, when something’s hovering on the bridge of your nose, all tingly and itchy and hard to ignore? Like that.

Someone unfamiliar and could pose a threat, even just a minor one, was standing behind me.

I, I turned around and the father was … standing there. Behind me. Facing towards the wall, towards a corner of the room, blocking the table lamp a bit from me. We both didn’t move, but I became _convinced_ that if he turned around his face would be gone. It would be replaced with static, black static, not like the static on tv screens but a dark, light sucking void that buzzed up your clenched jaw.

He wasn’t adjusting magazines or fluffing up pillows or doing _anything_. Just stood there. Facing the corner in that dark room away from me. It was so quiet, even though all the doors were wide open and there should have at least been the sound of insects from the summer evening outside or the daughters upstairs moving around or my brother clambering back into the kitchen for cat treats. It was silent and we both didn’t move, not a twitch, for, for – oh, I’m not certain how long. A while.

And all that time, while I was frozen, the static sure wasn’t. I could _feel_ it spreading. Past his face. Down his neck. Over his chest. Creeping along the curves of his head at whatever bits of skin I couldn’t see as well as deeper _into_ his skull. The itching vibration grew stronger and stronger and I couldn’t do anything but stare and wait for it to drip onto the floor or to wrap around his neck or for it to finally turn around and _face_ me.

My neck ached from my tense jaw and my spine was pulled as tight as a violin string about to snap when the static’s head turned, just a bit, just a few degrees and I _saw_.

One of the cats walked in then and everything dissipated. The mothers came back in after my brother at the other end of the house, loud. The daughters came down the stairs so we could go on a walk through the neighborhood. The living room was light again, to match the sunlight streaming into the mudroom right next to it. The father walked out of the living room to grab his keys; the static gone.

I didn’t see it again.

_Hmmph_, not much for you to go on, I’m afraid. A feeling from a paranoid, sleep-deprived kid that lasted what had to be only a few minutes. A trick of light and shadow perhaps. An overreactive imagination feeding on other weirder things I’ve seen.

I’m really not sure why I’m here still, _ha ha_.

* * *

_Miss Huang isn’t wrong about there not being much to follow up on. All told, a harmless encounter with the product of a bored and imaginative mind. Still…_

_Well, we have bigger concerns as of late. I’ll have Claude file this with the other benign, miscellaneous statements. _

**Author's Note:**

> “Sorry shushu and ayi,” I mutter under my breath as I write this. With minor cosmetic and setting changes, all of this happened in real life. And I do mean extremely minor changes.


End file.
